Twice, on consecutive days a week or so back, I realised that someone I knew on Twitter but did not know in real life… was someone I knew in real life. But I’d never made the connection! With one person it was not that their real name was missing from their twitter profile, it was just my brain had linked all I knew about them to their handle. In the other case, as far as I can see there is nothing to link their slightly obscure handle to their physical persona, despite the fact they are tweeting quite often about Oracle and also present at conferences. So that was simply not playing fair to hide their real identity in that way and I feel slightly aggrieved.

I’ve also had the experience of meeting someone in the flesh who treats me like an old friend, is being nice to me {possibly some sales-person-type I should back away from, I initially wonder?} but also knows a fair bit about me {Oh no! Creepy-stalker-type! Must-run must-run must-run} – before it dawns on me that this is actually Randolph Toddlepoddle who I have known online for 5 years, comments on my blog and I respond. But I’ve never met. And who is now wondering why I am being so unfriendly, am backing slowly away from them with a fixed grin on my face and scanning for exits. This has actually happened to me several times now. Thankfully only once with each person (I think – names & faces are not my forte}.

I have a relationship with you lot? {shudder!}

The result is that I am sure that for some people I have two utterly separate relationships with them – the online one and the in-the-flesh one. (According to xkcd comic 741 I have a relationship with you as you read my blog. When can I meet the parents?).

Another aspect of social media I feel is a little tricky for me, personally, is keeping track of what people have said to me and things I’ve said I’ll do. I have a poor memory, I can barely remember conversations last week. With email I can file them away and find them later (mostly I just file them away and wonder why my email directory is so massive). But with Twitter and Facebook comments? OK, so you can search but it is slow and it is not great. Only today (as I type) I remember being given some advice by my friend Brendan about writing articles. I went and checked my email ( under “friends/Brendan” or maybe “ora600/articles”, I can’t remember). Nope. Could I have put it elsewhere in my email store of information and event? Nope, no where in my email I could find. Ahh, it was a twitter conversation. Damn. Now I need to step back and find it…

Maybe there is an app to tie all this stuff together for me but I would have to find it and learn it and the vendor will get bored or go bust in 2 years and I’ll lose the lot then. I’d rather mow the lawn.

Then there is the much-commented-on aspect of online comments where some people seem to sign up to a service or follow someone, just so they can be snide or criticise. No, this is not the usual rant about these phalluses (phalli?), It’s more that I don’t read user comments on the BBC web site much anymore as it lowers my already pretty sociopathic outlook on the human race (don’t get me wrong, many individual humans are wonderful animals – but as a pack they are a nasty and destructive species). It’s not that there are nasty or thoughtless people who put these comments up, we learnt there are people like that in the school playground (or even in the classroom – Mr Jenkins, you know who you are). It’s just that seeing what people can put on social media reminds me more about how dysfunctional people can be than meeting people in the flesh does. Being able to have some control over people you meet in the flesh means real people don’t tend to enhance my sociopathic tendencies as much as social media.

I follow a couple of “humorous” twitter accounts. They put the same stuff up all the time, sometimes it’s obviously fake and they “borrow” from each other like crazy. But it’s just a few tweets and if I find the repetitive nature of it or their take on humour gives me less amusement than annoyance, I can always do that “unfollow” thing. I am not in any way being forced to be exposed to it. I don’t have to start commenting all the time about “you got this from redit!!!” or “You spelt that wrong you moron” or “That’s not funny, I can tell it’s a paper bag on a baby”. I made the mistake a couple of weeks back of responding to one saying “Dude, thanks for pointing out the totally obvious, it had CLEAR passed me by”. Yeah, I told you I had sociopathic leanings – I went and did what they had done to annoy me, there was no need for me to read the comments if I knew it would annoy me.

Of course, I could just stop joining in; close my twitter account, delete the blog, remove my inconsequential presence on facebook. But then, I’m now in all these relationships (sometimes two or three times with the same person). How can I break up with so many people?🙂

Not a very exciting Friday Philosophy this week I’m afraid, just a self-publicising announcement that I am now on Twitter. I’ve put the wordpress widget on the blog for a while (days or weeks, I don’t know), my twitter name is MDWidlake. {I was a little surprised mwidlake had gone already but that says more about how rare I consider my surname to be than naivety, I hope}. It seems you can click on a part of the widget to follow me, which is a pretty safe thing to do as I am not very verbal as yet.

As I said, I’m not very active at the moment, I’m more following just a few friends and seeing what people use Twitter for. So far it mostly seems to be about:

Random stuff posted when bored

Complaining about work or, more specifically, tasks that are proving trickier than hoped

Drinking

Random stuff posted when bored

Articles that have caught someone’s eye

…or more often, about tweets about articles that have caught someone’s eye

Chatty stuff that only makes sense between social peers (and isn’t that one of the main points of something like Twitter?)

Random stuff posted when bored

Cuddly toys. I think that is a result of low sample size and that Doug Burns is away at a conference. I worry about his sanity sometimes.

Niall Litchfield, Neil Chandler and Doug Burns were right {thanks again for your advice, gents}, there is some nice stuff on there and I’ve already seen some articles and web pages I found interesting via it – but I have also failed to get on with proper work-like stuff I should have been doing as a result.

I also like the chatty extension to real social engagement that Twitter gives but I hold out on my final decision as to whether this makes up for the negative impact it seems to have on real, meeting-in-person socialising.

The interface to Twitter seems a bit, well, rubbish to me. I know, I’ve been on there for all of a week and I am probably missing the Bleedin’ Obvious but it seems the stuff I see in Timeline, the default view, is just a subset of what people I follow say. I suspect that it’s got something to do with whether the person the tweet is replying to is on my follow list. To understand half the social stuff you have to go clicking around on people’s full tweet history and follow the thread back. Surely there is an easier way than this, maybe some connect-by tree-walk SQL could be invoked…

I’ve already dropped one person off my “following” list. I only followed one celebrity and I decided I could live without the random musings of Simon Pegg. I can imagine people get addicted to following several dozen b to z level celebs, maybe it’s like constantly living in some sort of poor quality reality tv show {Personally I tend to avoid all reality TV, I prefer reality. Except that I am forced to watch that dancing thing on BBC by my wife. And like most men who make that sort of defence, I can’t quite explain away why I still watch it if she is away…}.

So, don’t expect too much in the way of interesting, witty, insightful or even existing tweets from me as yet, but if you want to follow, heck you can always drop me like a sack of manure any time you like🙂.